PREM SHANKAR JHA - The RSS is sparing no effort to create a sense of siege among Muslims - Instead of a Hindu rashtra India will become the world’s largest failed state // SATYABRATA PAL: The BJP’s call is not to uphold the constitution but to undo it
Even as Prime minister
Modi lauds the plurality of India and the profound peacefulness of Sufi
Islam, the RSS and its cohorts have been sparing no effort to drive a deep
wedge between the Hindus and Muslims in our country.
A single day’s
newspaper tells us that the student Umar Khalid found, while being questioned
in jail, that his interrogators had already decided his guilt before they
talked to him, because he was a Muslim whose father had been an activist of the
now banned SIMI. Anirban Bhattacharya was repeatedly cajoled by his
interrogators to get all charges against him dropped by pinning all the blame
for the February 9 sloganeering on Khalid.
Waris Pathan, a Muslim
MLA, In Maharashtra is suspended from the state assembly for refusing to chant Bharat
Mata ki Jai. On the same day four Kashmiri students are arrested in
Rajasthan because someone reported to the police that they were eating beef in
their hostel. In Jharkhand, two Muslim cattle traders are murdered by a gang of
criminals, and the public and the media immediately conclude that the
killers belong to a cow protection group.
In Delhi the BJP MP
from Agra, Ramshanker Katheria, (who is a member of Mr Modi’s council of
ministers, no less) publicly warns the UP state government that Agra will
see a ‘different kind of Holi’ if cases lodged against one BJP and two local
VHP ‘leaders’ for making hate speeches against Muslims, comparing them to
‘rakshasas’ who need to be cornered and destroyed’, are not withdrawn before
the festival. All this news appearing on a single day evinces no shock because,
from Ghar Wapsi, to ‘Love Jihad‘, to throwing beef into a temple, to killing Mohammad Akhlaq, to changing the name of Aurangzeb Road in Delhi, such
inflammatory statements and actions have become routine in the past 21 months.
Intimidating
dissenters: What is relatively
new is the brazen attempt to intimidate anyone – like Kanhaiya Kumar or Teesta Setalvad – who has the courage to take up
cudgels in defence of the freedom of speech, thought, justice and legal
process; the administration of punishment to them through harassment, torture
and beatings while in judicial custody, the cancellation of licenses and denial
of access to funds.
Beneath all of this
runs one leitmotif : The Muslims are not ‘us’. In
anthropological terms, they are the alien ‘other’ and don’t belong in a
resurgent Hindu India. The Muslim conquest of India was an aberration, and its
impact on Hindu culture must be erased.
The damage was real,
but was done aeons ago by rulers and generals now long dead. What does the
Sangh parivar hope to gain from making people who are not even
their lineal descendants pay a price today? Does it think that the community
will take this lying down forever? And if it does not, can India be purged of
190 million Muslims?
No matter what its
motives are, if it persists it will push the country into civil war and force
it to disintegrate, as the states in the south and east scramble to insulate
themselves from the virus being exported from the north. Instead of a Hindu rashtra India
will become the world’s largest failed state.
This may sound
alarmist but beneath the surface calm, changes have been taking place in the
structure of the Indian economy and society that have been weakening our
collective faith in the possibility of a prosperous future. These are
being felt most acutely by the youth, who have their entire lives ahead and do
not see how they will traverse it. The need of the hour is to reverse these
changes so that they can begin to hope again. The BJP/RSS is doing the exact
opposite.
Muslims’ worsening
plight: Partition made the
first serious dent in India’s syncretic culture by planting resentment and
suspicion in Hindus, and a wary defensiveness in Indian Muslims. With the
pre-partition Muslim elite having largely opted for Pakistan, the community
desperately needed educational and economic assistance to recover their place
in Indian society. But a bitter legacy of Partition was the Congress’s adamant
refusal to even consider the reservation of jobs and seats in schools and
colleges for Muslims, as this was the tool the British had used to split the
Indian social fabric.
V.P Singh was among
the first to recognise the long-term damage this had done. He understood that a
rural peasantry newly empowered by the Green Revolution was demanding
reservation in government jobs and colleges not for the sake of a handful of
poorly paid sinecures, but to create an urban base from which their children
and grandchildren could acquire the education that was the only avenue to the
modern world… read more:
SATYABRATA PAL: BJP’s call is not to uphold the constitution but to undo it
As India turns 69 this
year, the political resolution which the BJP’s National
Executive adopted on March 20, 2016 declared that: “Nationalism, national
unity and integrity are an article of faith with the BJP. Refusal to hail
Bharat – say Bharat Mata ki jai – in the name of freedom is unacceptable. Our
constitution describes India as Bharat also: refusal to chant victory to Bharat
tanatamounts to (sic) disrespect to the constitution itself….
Bharat Mata ki jai is not merely a slogan…. It is the heartbeat of a billion people
today. It is the reiteration of our constitutional obligation as citizens to
uphold its primacy. The BJP wishes to make it clear that it will firmly oppose
any attempt to disrespect Bharat and weaken its unity and integrity.”
Even for a party
intoxicated by the taste of nationalism on its tongue, this is an
astonishing series of non sequiturs. Firstly, refusing to
say Bharat Mata is not a “refusal to hail Bharat”. Since the constitution
nowhere describes India as Bharat Mata, or requires her to be celebrated,
neither does it follow that not saying Bharat Mata ki jai is to show
“disrespect to the constitution”. Our “constitutional obligation as citizens”
has been spelt out in the eleven fundamental duties of Article 51A, none of
which asks Indians to either chant a slogan or “uphold its primacy”. The final
illogical absurdity is the claim that not to mouth the slogan will “disrespect
Bharat”, and that this imagined slight will “weaken its unity and integrity”.
Surely even the BJP can’t think the nation is so fragile. If this was not the
rambling of what, in more ways than one, might be called a Congress-induced
haze, it will be our constitutional obligation as citizens to believe that the
BJP can’t think....
see also
RSS men attacked us, police forced us to forego legal action, say Sonepat Dalits
